Boutique boxing punches down

I must admit I was sceptical walking into BoxCentric, a boxing club on a leafy street in Knightsbridge. I half expected clients in expensive Hermès boxing gloves and Lululemon yoga pants. This wasn’t the sort of place where you’d find dog-eared copies of The Ring lying about, or pictures of some long-forgotten son of the squared circle. Nor did it have that familiar smell of sweat, leather, damp canvas and hand wraps accumulated over the years, ingrained in the very woodwork of the place.

Suffice to say this was not an old spit-and-sawdust sort of gym. Yet more than its style, what makes BoxCentric truly remarkable is how unexceptional it now feels. All over London, similar boxing boutiques are sprouting up like welts on a fighter’s face. BXR, founded by Olia Sardarova and backed by Anthony Joshua, has membership fees starting in the thousands. Then there’s JAB Boxing in Victoria, which features champion boxers from Harlem Eubank to Caroline Dubois in its slick promotions. Boxing, a working-class sport, sneered at by the likes of George Orwell, has been repackaged for the affluent.

KOBOX in Chelsea. Similar luxury gyms are popping up across London. (John Phillips/Getty for KOBOX)

Boxing’s migration into luxury gyms is easy to mock, but harder to dismiss. These clubs are opening the sport to women, professionals and people who would never enter a traditional gym. They are also giving fighters and trainers a way to earn outside the sport. The problem is not that the rich have discovered boxing. It is that, just as boxing becomes fashionable among the wealthy, the grassroots clubs that made it socially useful are starting to decay — with ominous consequences for the sport and its future.

As a boxer myself, it’s easy to scoff at the posh hitting pads. “This isn’t real boxing,” one England prospect tells me, “it’s feel-good boxing.” In practice, that means less actual sparring and more bag work, circuits and pads, played to some trippy music. Yet it’s precisely the pressure of being punched in the face, to paraphrase Joshua Buatsi, the Ghanaian-British Olympian, that makes diamonds. And for those of us who used to pay £2 in subs, £225 a month feels like a hook in the liver. For me, then, visiting BoxCentric felt rather exclusionary, a far cry from boxing’s egalitarian motto: all are welcome, rich or poor, black or white as long as you can fight .

The economic upper cut stings in other ways too. Think again to our England prospect. He wakes up early, cycles across London to teach a class, then returns for his own training in Brixton. And for what? Life for kids like him is hard. “You spend 10-to-15 years in the amateurs and get your brains bashed in,” says Dan Morley, a pundit and former professional. “There’s no money in the gym. We make little money from it.” It’s easy, then, to resent the suit turning up in a sanitised gym, thinking that a few hits makes him Balham’s answer to Joe Frazier.

All the same, I’m not sure sneering is quite right. “Everyone,” Morley points out, “should have an opportunity to try a sport.” That’s especially true when these new spaces have opened boxing up to people who would never have walked into a traditional gym. Louie Basso, a manager at JAB, tells me that around 65% of their clients are women. This is unsurprising. I myself have seen many women wanting to enter my gym, but finding the old boxing environment intimidating.

‘Everyone should have an opportunity to try a sport.’ (Scott Heavey/Getty for Coca Cola)

Morley makes a similar point. “It gives people who in previous eras would turn their nose up at boxing an understanding of how difficult it is — the technical aspect.” If a cleaner, safer, better-lit gym gets more men and women hitting pads, learning footwork and discovering the discipline of the sport, that’s hardly a bad thing, especially when audience numbers continue to drop.

As our England prospect’s early-morning hustle implies, meanwhile, luxury boutiques help boxers themselves. That £225 a month has to go somewhere, and fighters need all the help they can get. As Mark Turley shows in Journeymen: The Other Side of the Boxing Business, the average journeyman’s living often depends less on ability but on the fact that he’s a poor ticket seller. Few know that the fight game is stacked in favour of the ticket seller; as Morley puts it, the industry is “fucked”, controlled by promoters and with very few opportunities for outsiders. Boutique clubs offer former fighters a way to earn money outside the magic circle. Visit 12×3, a gym in the City, you can be taught by Darren Barker, a British, Commonwealth and world champion. George Veness, the founder of JAB, is another good example. A Newham boxing vet who fought for England before leaving the sport, he began training Victoria’s Secret models before replicating the idea at JAB.

“Boutique clubs offer former fighters a way to earn money outside the magic circle.”

There’s a broader point here too. Boxing may have been t…